Role of Spatial Design in Green Buildings-A Critical Review of Green Building Rating Systems

Green Building is a movement today and given the resources, all buildings aspire to be green certified. While making green building, the task is to achieve efficiency of site, energy, water and waste. The effort is rated and ranked through different green building rating systems prevalent across the world and certification label is issued based upon the credits achieved. This research paper carries out a comparison of all rating systems currently available. The credits are studied and classified under various themes (Architecture, MEP, Materials and Practices). There are further two categories under each theme-products/technology and design. Each credit is put under one or the other category and theme. Categorization of credits revealed some astonishing facts and one of the most astonishing facts is that spatial design/architectural design hardly figures in green building rating systems across the world. Most of the credits can be earned through incorporation of more efficient technology/products. There is very little importance given to design input. While credits can be awarded for selecting higher efficiency chiller, there is no means of comparing efficiency of one type of building design to another simply because base case is different for each building in terms of design. The study reveals that potential of architectural design in achieving efficiency has totally been ignored through credits awarding system. The study concludes that some more credits need to be added to the existing system to take into account the impact of architectural design in performance evaluation of green buildings which would make not just the buildings but architecture of these buildings also green.